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J.T. Pescador

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About J.T. Pescador

Juan Teodosio Pescador (b. 1937 Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Islas Canarias, Spain) is best known by his stagename ‘Ignotus’ or ‘Ignotus the Mage.’ A natural philosopher and skeptic, an inventor of complex symbolic structures, “J.T.” is also the great-uncle of Alma de la Serra.

Of Sr. Pescador’s early life little is known. Evidently he once taught rhetoric to high school students and was fired from his job for expressing his political views too freely during the fascist regime of Spain in the late 1950s. He supported himself as a stevedore, fisherman, and carnival mentalist, Ignotus the Mage. In the carnival circuit his fame as a fraud’s fraud eventually led him to swear off swindles and reinvent his act. As the mage Ignotus, Pescador assumes the role of a dysfunctional clairvoyant. Using a deck of cards of his own invention, he proceeds to tell only the present, claiming that he can see no further. In fact, like the I Ching or the Tarot, the cards have a complex symbolic function, but one which its inventor resolutely maintains is fraudulent. These same cards were further developed by Mr. Hertz for intermedia visual and musical compositions, after the two met in Santa Cruz in the late 1970s.

Ignotus produces very little material art himself, for this he relies on the members of the workshop. One could call him a conceptual artist.

Thirteen Ignodicta, J.T. Pescador, 2000

Of 13 IgnoDicta Pescador says: The series of 13 dicta, which Sr. Hertz has printed as an edition for public consumption, reflect my reactions to the world of art. Like me they are probably out of date, but then I don’t really make art. Why make art when you can make artists?